BEAR’S BEER BLOG – Snow

GLEN HUMPHRIES26 Feb 2016, 11 a.m.

From what I understand, Snow is the best-selling beer in the world.

From what I understand, Snow is the best-selling beer in the world.

Which sounds believable – it’s a beer from China and they’ve got an awful lot of people living there. So if a lot of them buy Snow it would go a long way to making it the world’s best in terms of sales.

For a fair while it was impossible to get in Australia. I’d heard Asian grocers would stock it, but after a lot of looking I never saw a bottle anywhere.

But Dan Murphy’s has decided to import the beer, selling it for $3.79 a bottle. That must make the Chinese giggle because it apparently retails for 50 cents a bottle over there. In China it’s just a beer, but in Australia it’s an imported “premium lager”.

Which would all be fine if it was worth the price tag. Which it isn’t. The aroma is similar to some mainstream lagers we have here – malt and wet cardboard – but the flavour, well that's all wrong.

There’s no balance here – in fact, it’s as though the brewer didn't even bother to try. The flavour is stronger than Australian lagers but it comes with a real bluntness where the malt overpowers everything else in the bottle. And it does so in an uneven way.

Still, you should try it, just so you can say you've had the best-selling beer in the world. But maybe buy a single bottle rather than a whole six-pack.